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Saturday, July 28, 2007

Northern Breeds Don't Shed

In the continuing educational series of Northern Breed Dogs, Professor Meeshka will now tell you humans the truth about shedding.

We don’t.

Nope, you can go right out and adopt hundreds of us and there won’t be one single piece of fur shed in your house ever.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA!

Ok, I’m such a liar.

As an example of fur shedding, take a look at this picture. This is an actual fur clump that fell off of Indy when his human dad scared the fur right off him during a game of hide and seek.

Northern Breeds like Huskies and Malamutes will shed 365 days a week, but twice a year they literally fall apart with HUGE clumps of fur (such as depicted in the picture) when we “blow” our downy undercoats. In the spring we dump out the downy winter undercoat and don our summer fur, which is slightly less fluffy than our winter fur, and in the fall we dump out the downy summer undercoat to make room for our very fluffy winter coat. During the rest of the year, we dump out our guard hairs all over the place. The guard hairs are like spikey fur that protects us from the rain and snow. Its sorta like scotch-guarded hair. That keeps the wetness from soaking into our downy undercoat and protects us from getting too cold or too hot.

Some humans think that in the summer we’ll get too hot with all that fur, but we don’t. Its like insulation, call it a fluffy soda can coozy if you will, and we’re perfectly happy in the summer because we’re protected by our coats. The humans that don’t know better will sometimes shave us and that just makes things horrible bad for us. We can get sun-burned very easily without or protective coats, we’re also at the mercy of the biting stingy bugs that can get to our skin without our coats. Even worse is that sometimes our coats don’t grow back right!

Take Spinless Bionic Hip Sammy as the example. After his drastic reverse mohawk spine surgery shave, it took forever for his fur to grow back in and even still, after 7 months he still has one bald spot that hasn’t grown one tiny bit of fur. Luckily its a small spot and the humans comb some fur over it to hide it, but still, that could happen to a northern breed all over if they get shaved.

So, whatever you do, NEVER shave a Northern Breed dog. We’re fluffy for a reason!

Also, if you don’t want fur all over your furniture, carpet, clothes, hair, food, toilet paper, car, yard, and in your mouth... don’t get a northern breed dog. When northern breed owners jokingly say “fur is just another condiment”... they aren’t kidding, seriously. You can vacuum all you want, it’ll still be there in every nook and cranny, every little thing you own.

Now, for all of you that actually made it through that lesson, what kinds of things can be made from Northern Breed fur that are shown in the “We shed a lot” pictures for huskies? Whoever can tell me first in a comment post will win a non-shedding barking husky!

Woo Meeshka... don't forget... our outer coat can get in the human's eyes too! Mom sometimes will get a piece of my fur in her eye and sometimes it will take her like 5 minutes to fish it out, ha rooO!!! Ohh, I have alot of fur that can be made into something. Who wants it, ha rooo!Hugs.Sitka

What I meant was the humans make very warm things like scarves & mittens & hats from our shed fluffy undercoats (geesh, I better clarify or someone's bound to think that we can actually knit things ourselves!) We make beautiful scarves!Also mittens & hats, too.

"Northern Breeds like Huskies and Malamutes will shed 365 days a week"--wow! No wonder your weeks are busy Meeshka; you're packing in 365 days worth of "fluff sharing" activity into a week! That's a lot of shedding!!

My mom was just having a discussion with one of her friends about shaving. Her friend just got an Eskie and mentioned shaving it and our mom was like, "no you can't do that!" She told her friend that she better get a book on Eskies so she could read about them and learn what she needs to do to be a responsible parent. Humans just don't know what's going on.

If you want to SHARE it and link to the actual blog, that's fine and dandy, but don't be downloading my stuff and uploading it anywhere, and if you want to use any of it... JUST ASK ME! Is that so hard? I even have a "Contact Me" button, can't make it any easier.... Seriously???